The Degrees of Freedom Regions of MIMO Broadcast, Interference, and Cognitive Radio Channels with No CSIT

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the degrees of freedom regions for various MIMO channels with and without channel state information at the transmitter, revealing when simple schemes suffice and when feedback can improve capacity.

Contribution

It provides the exact DoF region for the K-user MIMO broadcast channel and bounds for interference and cognitive radio channels, extending understanding of DoF without CSIT.

Findings

Exact DoF region for K-user MIMO BC with no CSIT

Inner and outer bounds for MIMO IC and CRC DoF regions

Conditions where lack of CSIT affects DoF performance

Abstract

The degrees of freedom (DoF) regions are characterized for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel (BC), interference channels (IC) (including X and multi-hop interference channels) and the cognitive radio channel (CRC), when there is perfect and no channel state information at the receivers and the transmitter(s) (CSIR and CSIT), respectively. For the K-user MIMO BC, the exact characterization of the DoF region is obtained, which shows that a simple time-division-based transmission scheme is DoF-region optimal. Using the techniques developed for the MIMO BC, the corresponding problems for the two-user MIMO IC and the CRC are addressed. For both of these channels, inner and outer bounds to the DoF region are obtained and are seen to coincide for a vast majority of the relative numbers of antennas at the four terminals, thereby characterizing DoF regions for all but a few cases. Finally, the DoF regions of the $K$-user MIMO IC, the CRC, and X networks are derived for certain classes of these networks, including the one where all transmitters have an equal number of antennas and so do all receivers. The results of this paper are derived for distributions of fading channel matrices and additive noises that are more general than those considered in other simultaneous related works. The DoF regions with and without CSIT are compared and conditions on the relative numbers of antennas at the terminals under which a lack of CSIT does, or does not, result in the loss of DoF are identified, thereby providing, on the one hand, simple and robust communication schemes that don't require CSIT but have the same DoF performance as their previously found CSIT counterparts, and on the other hand, identifying situations where CSI feedback to transmitters would provide gains that are significant enough that even the DoF performance could be improved.